564751 - Annoying alert messages coming on top of every others applications

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 288896

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[slambert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: 3.0.4

Thunderbird is running with my 25 email accounts. It is supposed to check emails sometimes and I regularly go to see if I received new emails.

But during the rest of the time, I have others things to do. It can be coding, consulting emails, or even playing.

The annoying point is very, very often, I'm doing something else critical and suddenly, Thunderbird appears on the screen with a noisy sound and an alert message "this folder is being processed", or "connection time out" or whatever. And this is real pain as it is very often, when I m writing my code, when I fill a password form somewhere, when I have a flash game, whatever. The result is I'm regularly very upset because it makes me lose my game, break my password form, interrupt my writing, etc...

I don't want Thunderbird to squirt on my screen every hours with this stressing and aggressive behavior. Thunderbird is just a mail client I run on background and these messages are very, very low level of importance. I don't care one of my pop, sometimes, is not available, as it will come back on its own a few minutes later. I absolutely don't care to know the internal engine had a failure ad couldn't do itself what was scheduled on its own because a folder "is processed". These points are on the responsibility of the developers, not mine.

At this stage,m and after all these years and all the messages the Thunderbird team already reads about this matter, I consider these annoyances not as functionality but as bugs.

Si I would very happy this to be fixed, or at least, to find a way to stop these alerts jumping on my face with the whole application on first screen when I'm doing something else.

And don't tell me I have to close the software when I need to do something else like a game or a writing, because this will not be a receivable answer.

Thanks.




Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
comes on full screen with alert warning and big noise, whatever you are doing. I lots quite a lot of data with this thing appearing violently on my screen when I was doing something else.
Imagine you re playing a flash game at night and you lose at the last level because your screen is interrupted by a stupid "this folder is processed" alert. Developers should take care more of that after all these years. There s no way to deactivate these warnings and the only solution is to switch off the whole software to have peace. Unbelievable.

Expected Results:  
shut up and be quiet when you do something else.

Comment 3

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Isn't this fixed by bug 123440?

Comment 4

[slambert]

This is not5 a duplicate o the bug 538601 .

This is an annoying modal alert box problems.

Whatever the reason (time out, etc...), the software shouldn't steal focus and disturb users all the time.

A blink in the general tab should be enough, like when most of applications have something to say.

Fix this one first, and go to the other bugs next. This will help and please a lot, lot of users.

Thanks.

Comment 5

[Matt]

As a chronic sufferer of the non-fatal error regarding truncating the Inbox, I'd like to change this annoying modal error window to have 2 possible behaviour options: 

1) disregard this error for the rest of this session, or
2) disregard this error permanently (reset in Tools->Options menu)


Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Matt (N Wales, UK)

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

please try version 3.1.1 and report results

Comment 7

[Matt]

Upgraded to v.3.1.1. 

This has not stopped the regularly occurring, annoying, non-fatal warning: 

"There was an error truncating the Inbox after filtering a message to folder '<foldername>'. You may need to shutdown Thunderbird and delete INBOX.msf."

My feature request is still for this warning to made optional, because:

a) deleting INBOX.msf has no effect, and
b) there are no obvious negative impacts on Thunderbird's operation.

Matt (N Wales, UK)

Comment 8

[Matt]

Upgraded to v.3.1.1. 

This has not stopped the regularly occurring, annoying, non-fatal warning: 

"There was an error truncating the Inbox after filtering a message to folder '<foldername>'. You may need to shutdown Thunderbird and delete INBOX.msf."

My feature request is still for this warning to made optional, because:

a) deleting INBOX.msf has no effect, and
b) there are no obvious negative impacts on Thunderbird's operation.

Matt (N Wales, UK)

Comment 9

[Mikael Willberg]

I'm also annoyed by this "sliding ****" and zeroing out the alert attributes in config editor does not hide them. There should be a way to disable all of these.

I think there should be a tab or docked area of some sort, for all errors and on going activity where user can dismiss/clear these. The activity manager is a log not realtime indicator.

Maybe a fancy user selectable way, even with GUI:

Notifications:
  When new messages arrive: [ ] Sliding Alert [ ] Beep [ ] SMS 8-)
  When there is an error:   [ ] Sliding Alert [ ] Beep [ ] SMS 8-)
  ...

Comment 10

[slambert]

you people are crazy with these modal alerts. This ticket is almost 2 years old and it's still "unconfirmed" . This bugzilla and the web are full of people asking for the END of the modal system. After all these years it is obvious the team tries to make the modl alerts mandatory and refuses to give us the choice to deactivate them. So we have to continue to suffer, to see  our Thunderbird complaining with useless messages asking for no actions but breaking our thinking and writing. Thunderbird created the modal pop up concept : anywhere on your coputer , at any time, and whatever what you re doing, you can have a pop up coming with system modal noise to tell you "I couldn't connect" or "I'm compacting". It will destroy your full screen game, your writing, your full screen video, your coding thinking, etc.... hey gusm, did you receive a cheque from MS to do that to us for 10 years?
I added the PPA so I run Thunderbird 10 in my Ubuntu: there's still no way to stop these annoying modal pigeaon shots. Even the config param prompts.tab_modal.enabled is not available ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_tab-modal_prompts ) , And don;t tell me about this poor code patch from the bug 123440 as it is impossible to use when you follow the normal repository version.